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Grady Harp, October 4, 2008

A Magician of Poetry

Andrew Demcak is a polished professional. Though his poems have appeared in many very fine journals, this appears to be his first published collection where the stage is his and his alone. His style is unique: each of the 66 poems is written in six stanzas of couplets and each poem lives on an individual page, and from this 'confinement' that would restrict other writers in scope of content and conveying a mood or atmosphere or short story, Demcak creates his magic.

The range of emotions and images and topics and observations he touches is so vast that Demcak is able to address any reader of poetry and enhance previous flights of thought with completely new visions. Equally at home in describing nature and people and memories of poets passed, he draws upon what seems like an endless vocabulary which he uses in ways that causes our infatuation with words to blossom with fresh meaning. An example:

'SLEEP IN THE MOJAVE DESERT
We doze and swelter in a comfortless
desert. Stars ignite the lengthy evening.

Crickets congregate in their armor-plate.
Grains of sand retain the day's heat. We lie

queerly here, objects of obsidian.
The rabbi's sad cry from owl talon.

The sky splits at sunup to dearer air,
cool dew gliding from the blue horizon,

the straight distance without road or address.
Noonday earthstones connecting dry lines,

guarding their pallid salts, where lizards creep
like firecats emerged from cinders.'

Extracting one poem from this bounty contained in CATCHING TIGERS IN RED WEATHER is almost cruel, so completely fresh is every poem and profound. Demcak is able to cross gender lines as well as any poet today as his LAST LOVE proves:

'So everything came into place, He tore
the gauze to the core of my boyhood,

sliding in while my eyelids turned plum.
His bitter mouth, the insistent red veil

of the Gaza sun, my thighs like twin doors
held open. I had chosen the closest

man, cut my bandages like a runner
testing his legs. I unfolded myself

a loose-petalled Narcissus, Anxious
for his erection, condomless, straining,

unaware that his body politic
was followed by the viral campaign.'

Andrew Demcak is an important new voice, a man who will surely change literature and the way we enter the unexplainable places that poetry finds and describes. This is a rich book of brilliant jewels. Highly recommended!

Grady Harp

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